You know by now if you’ve been around the MamaBake HQ traps that we love to experiment with different foods and creating fun alternatives for our members (join here for the movement and here for our online Big Batch Baking Club).

When we stumbled across the vegetable spiraliser we were intrigued.  Karen had bought one a few months ago and had worn it out after a month.  I rather loved the idea of turning sweet potatoes and zucchinis into ‘noodles’.  It looked to be a welcome change from steaming or baking them.

I started to keep my eyes peeled for one of these contraptions and after a really good hunt around my nearest big town, eventually found a small hand held one.

I couldn’t really figure it out at first and the kids had a marvellous time fiddling around with it.  It is bright green and looks like a fun toy so the kids were very attracted to it.

The lowdown:

The Hoorays!

• It does what it says it does:  it spiralizes the vegetables into noodles
• The kids really enjoyed getting involved in the process – hooray!
• It meant another way of using vegetables that could be used as an alternative to spaghetti or noodles
• Cool design (not that ‘cool’ ever really comes into any of my equations these days)
• It is nice and small so great space-wise
• The noodles were fab! I made sweet potato, zucchini and carrot noodles to go with a bolognaise sauce and it was delicious.
• Solid little contraption and has survived many dropsies on the wooden floor.

The boo’s:

• I found it a tad expensive around the $50 mark.  I think $30 would have been more spot on.
• The shaft of the thing is only quite short so you can’t put in a 12 inch long piece of carrot and be done with it. You have to cut into rather small chunks – unwind the thing, stuff the carrot in and then wind it up to crush and spiralise the vegetable.
• The shaft was also, of course, a fixed width so with the vast majority of the vegetables especially sweet potatoes I wanted to spiralise, I had to shave them off to ensure they were the correct width – I used the shavings but even so I could see that there is fair potential for waste.
• I appreciate this sounds dreadfully aristocratic and first world but I did find the whole winding thing tedious for every 3 inch piece of vegetable. And bearing in mind I was needing enough noodles for a family of four, it just took too long.  Lucky for me the children thought it was MARVELLOUS fun.
• Irritatingly, sometimes the winding action wouldn’t grind the vegetable into spirals and just grind it into mush thus wasting some of the vegetable.

Karen’s thoughts on it:

• Sometimes tricky to get a ‘regulation’ length of spaghetti
• Put it in the cupboard and forgot I owned it over Winter: summer I’ll pull it out
• Mine didn’t come with instructions so I’m winging it
• Like all gadgets, it’s great IF YOU USE IT